Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude Sonnet 4.5

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 819 posts

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.5

#271

Post by andrewstuart »

peterdstallion wrote: post #157

I am a paying subscriber to Gemini, Claude and OpenAI. I don't know if it's me, but over the last few weeks I've got to the conclusion ChatGPT is very strongly leading the race. Every answer it gives me is better - it's more concise and more informative. I look forward to testing this further, but out of the few runs I just did after reading about this - it isn't looking much better

>> I am a paying subscriber to Gemini, Claude and OpenAI

Me too.

I find ChatGPT is the best analyzer of complex situations but Claude does a better job of writing the code, so u get ChatGPT to design things and solve problems then I give that to Claude/Gemini to implement.

Gemini is good at both.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.5

#272

Post by stefs »

itsoktocry wrote: post #197
rudedogg wrote: post #70

I just ran this through a simple change I’ve asked Sonnet 4 and Opus 4.1, and it fails too. It’s a simple substitution request where I provide a Lint error that suggests the correct change. All the models fail. I could ask someone with no development experience to do this change and they could. I worry everyone is chasing benchmarks to the detriment of general performance. Or the next token weight for the incorrect c…

> It’s a simple substitution request where I provide a Lint error that suggests the correct change. All the models fail. I could ask someone with no development experience to do this change and they could. I don't understand why this kind of thing is useful. Do the thing yourself and move on. For every one problem like this, AI can do 10 better/faster than I can.

How can I trust it to do the complicated task well when it fails to do the simple thing?

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.5

#273

Post by gapeslape »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #169

> Practically speaking, we’ve observed it maintaining focus for more than 30 hours on complex, multi-step tasks. Really curious about this since people keep bringing it up on Twitter. They mention it pretty much off-handedly in their press release and doesn't show up at all in their system card. It's only through an article on The Verge that we get more context. Apparently they told it to build a Slack clone and left…

“30 hours of unattended work” is totally vague and it doesn’t mean anything on its own. It - at the very least - highly depends on the amount of tokens you were able to process.

Just to illustrate, say you are running on a slow machine that outputs 1 token per hour. At that speed you would produce approximately one sentence.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.5

#274

Post by Implicated »

iagooar wrote: post #258

Anecdotal evidence. I have a fairly large web application with ~200k LoC. Gave the same prompt to Sonnet 4.5 (Claude Code) and GPT-5-Codex (Codex CLI). "implement a fuzzy search for conversations and reports either when selecting "Go to Conversation" or "Go to Report" and typing the title or when the user types in the title in the main input field, and none of the standard elements match, a search starts with a 2s de…

I'm not trying to be offensive here, feel the need to indicate that.

But that prompt leads me to believe that you're going to get rather 'random' results due to leaving SO much room for interpretation.

Also, in my experience, punctuation is important - particularly for pacing and grouping of logical 'parts' of a task and your prompt reads like a run on sentence.

Making a lot of assumptions here - but I bet if I were in your shoes and looking to write a prompt to start a task of a similar type that my prompt would have been 5 to 20x the length of yours (depending on complexity and importance) with far more detail, including overlapping of descriptions of various tasks (ie; potentially describing the same thing more than once in different ways in context/relation to other things to establish relation/hierarchy).

I'm glad you got what you needed - but these types of prompts and approaches are why I believe so many people think these models aren't useful.

You get out of them what you put into them. If you give them structured and well written requirements as well as a codebase that utilizes patterns you're going to get back something relative to that. No different than a developer - if you gave a junior coder, or some team of developers the following as a feature requirement: `implement a fuzzy search for conversations and reports either when selecting "Go to Conversation" or "Go to Report" and typing the title or when the user types in the title in the main input field, and none of the standard elements match, a search starts with a 2s delay` then you can't really be mad when you don't get back exactly what you wanted.

edit: To put it another way - spend a few more minutes on the initial task/prompt/description of your needs and you're likely to get back more of what you're expecting.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.5

#275

Post by lossolo »

kurtis_reed wrote: post #250
simonw wrote: post #204

I had access to a preview over the weekend, I published some notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/29/claude-sonnet-4-5/ It's very good - I think probably a tiny bit better than GPT-5-Codex, based on vibes more than a comprehensive comparison (there are plenty of benchmarks out there that attempt to be more methodical than vibes). It particularly shines when you try it on https://claude.ai/ using its brand n…

Why did you have access to a preview?

The same reason YouTube reviewers and influencers get access to hardware or games before release. In this case, the person is a passionate blogger.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.5

#277

Post by Mathiciann »

stavros wrote: post #183
Mathiciann wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am almost convinced your comment is parody but I am not entirely sure. You want proof for critical/supportive criticism? Then almost in the same sentence you make an insane claim without backing this up by any evidence.

Well, here's an even more insane claim: I'm infinity times more productive, as I just wouldn't even start projects without the LLM to sidestep my ADHD. Then, when the LLM invariably fucks up, I step in and finish things myself! Here are a few projects that I made these past few months that wouldn't have been possible without LLMs: * https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula - A simple blood test viewer. * https://www.…

Well done, some of these projects look cool.

Although I was just commenting on the irony of the parent comment.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.5

#279

Post by cloverich »

mbesto wrote: post #189
cloverich wrote: post #108

Please y'all, when you list supportive or critical complaints based on your actual work, include some specifics of the task and prompt. Like actual prompt, actual bugs, actual feature, etc. I've had great success with both ChatGPT and Claude for years, am around 3x sustained output increase in my professional work, and kicking off and finishing new side projects / features that I used to simply not ever finish. BUT t…

> include some specifics of the task and prompt. Like actual prompt, actual bugs, actual feature, etc. > I am still surprised at things it cannot do, for example Claude code could not seem to stitch together three screens in an iOS app using the latest SwiftUI (I am not an iOS dev). You made a critical comment yet didn't follow your own rules lol. > it's so helpful for meaningful conversation! How so? FWIW - I too ha…

> How so?

Sure. Another article was posted today[1] on the subject. An example claim:

> If we asked the AI to solve a task that was already partially solved, it would just replicate code all over the project. We’d end up with three different card components. Yes, this is where reviews are important, but it’s very tiring to tell the AI for the nth time that we already have a Text component with defined sizes and colors. Adding this information to the guidelines didn’t work BTW.

This is helpful framing. I would say to this: I have also noticed this pattern. I have seen two approaches help. One, I break up UI / backend tasks. At the end of UI tasks, and sometimes before I even look at the code, I say: "Have you reviewed your code against the existing components library ?" and sometimes "Have you reviewed the written code compared to existing patterns and can you identify opportunities for abstraction?" (I use plan mode for the latter, and review what it says). The other approach which I have seen others try, but have not myself (but it makes sense), is to automatically do this with a sub agent or hook. At a high level it seems like a good approach given I am manually doing the same thing now.

[1]: https://antropia.studio/blog/to-ai-or-not-to-ai/

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.5

#280

Post by [deleted] »

iagooar wrote: post #258

Anecdotal evidence. I have a fairly large web application with ~200k LoC. Gave the same prompt to Sonnet 4.5 (Claude Code) and GPT-5-Codex (Codex CLI). "implement a fuzzy search for conversations and reports either when selecting "Go to Conversation" or "Go to Report" and typing the title or when the user types in the title in the main input field, and none of the standard elements match, a search starts with a 2s de…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN